Pages

Thursday, July 25, 2013

HUMANAE VITAE AFTER 45 YEARS (Part 1: How We Got Here)

Humanae Vitae was promulgated 45 years ago this week
by Pope Paul VI. Without a doubt if has become the most controversial Catholic
document of our time. Reaction to this encyclical has amounted to an open
revolt on a scale unseen since the Reformation. The Church has been ridiculed
and derided for its position on artificial contraception. She has been accused
of being stuck in the middle ages, out of touch with the times, and hostile to
women. For all those who cast stones at the Church, few have taken the time to
read Humanae Vitae or to understand
the reasons behind the Church’s teaching.

Birth
control is not new. Egyptian papyruses dating more than 1,500 years before the
birth of Christ describe various methods of birth control from using honey,
acacia leaves and lint to form a primitive diaphragm-like barrier to utilizing
crocodile dung as a spermicide. The ancient Greeks utilized the siliphium plant
to concoct a contraceptive potion. It was so popular it was harvested to
extinction. Animal skin condemns and other herbal remedies were utilized by
various cultures through the ages. In a similar manner, there is a historical
trail of consistent Christian teaching against contraception dating from the
earliest days of the Church.

Fathers
of the Church such as Clement of Alexandria (AD 195) and Hippolytus of Rome (AD
255) condemned the practice. Lactantius (AD 307), a Christian philosopher and
apologist, and advisor to Emperor Constantine, instructed couples to use
abstinence if they were too poor to have more children rather than resorting to
potions.

St.
John Chrysostom (AD 391) wrote, “Why do you sow where the field is eager to
destroy the fruit, where there are medicines of sterility, where there is
murder before birth? You do not even let a harlot remain only a harlot, but you
make her a murderess as well... Indeed, it is something worse than murder, and
I do not know what to call it; for she does not kill what is formed but
prevents its formation.”

Likewise,
St. Augustine (AD 419) also harshly condemned the practice of contraception
writing, “Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked
where the conception of the offspring is prevented.” The Bishop of Hippo
understood the use of contraception to be such an attack on the marital act
that he taught that if husbands and wives intentionally engaged in
contraceptive sex that “they are not spouses at all”.

Even
the later Protestant reformers were unanimous in their condemnation of
contraception. Luther considered it “far more atrocious than incest and
adultery”. John Calvin called it “a monstrous thing” and likened contraception
to murder.

Consider
that Christians could not keep in agreement on matters such as the real
presence of Christ in the Eucharist or what books belonged in the bible. We
have splintered over papal authority and infallibility. We haven’t even been
able to maintain agreement over how man is saved. Yet somehow, for nearly 2,000
years all of Christianity was able to maintain consistent agreement over the
immorality of contraception until only 80 years ago.

In
the early 20th century Margaret Sanger and her associates, backed
financially by the likes of the Rockefeller family and other wealthy
progressives, dedicated themselves to changing public opinion and established
anti-contraception laws both in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Utilizing civil disobedience, public debates, and persistent political
campaigning they succeeded in their mission of shifting the culture in the
direction of accepting birth control—a term Sanger is credited with coining. One
of their most powerful tools was the practice of using isolated, extreme
examples of hardship caused by not having access to contraception. Doing so
allowed them to claim a moral high ground while framing their opponents as
heartless, cold, and uncaring. This is a tactic still in use today by those
pushing the limits of cultural mores.

Similar
tactics were employed within the ranks of the Anglican Church in England.
During the 1920 Lambeth Conference, a decennial assembly of the Anglican
leadership, the issue of possible moral uses of birth control for married
couples was brought up and soundly defeated. In only ten years that position
would come under fire again. At the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican
Communion was swayed by heart rending stories of children and families
suffering in extreme poverty and women running the risk of death as the result
of complicated pregnancies. Breaking with over 1,900 years of tradition, they
decided to allow married couples to practice birth control under serious
circumstances. The dam had cracked and the flood waters were soon to follow as
one by one other denominations began to follow suit in shifting their moral
position on contraception.

In
December 1930 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii, On Christian
Marriage, as a direct response to the actions of the Anglicans at Lambeth.
Referring to contraception as a “criminal abuse” and a “deed which is shameful
and intrinsically vicious”, Pope Pius could not have been more direct or
forceful in his reiteration of longstanding Christian teaching on the
immorality of contraception:

“Since, therefore, openly departing from the uninterrupted
Christian tradition some have judged it possible solemnly to declare another
doctrine regarding this question, the Catholic Church, to whom God has
entrusted the defense of the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in
the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her, in order that she may preserve
the chastity of the nuptial union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises
her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims
anew: any use whatsoever of matrimony exercised in such a way that the act is
deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offense against the law of God and of
nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of a grave sin.” (#56, emphasis
added)

With
the advent of the Pill as an approved oral contraception in 1960, new questions
arose regarding the morality of contraception. Specifically, many honestly
wondered if this new method of birth control, so different than previous forms,
could be interpreted as an acceptable means of regulating births. Pope John
XXIII formed a commission to study this question in 1962 on the eve of the
Second Vatican Council. Unfortunately, John XXIII did not live to see the final
report of the commission on birth control or the conclusion of the Council.
Both of those tasks were left to his successor, Paul VI.

Following
his election to the papacy, Paul VI expanded the birth control commission to
over 50 experts including clerics, theologians, and laity. The commission ended
in 1967 and although sworn to secrecy, someone leaked information to the press.
Word spread that the commission tendered two reports. The majority report
recommended a dramatic reversal in the Church’s position on artificial birth
control by declaring that use of artificial contraception was not intrinsically
evil and should be left to the conscience of married couples. The minority
report encouraged the pontiff to maintain the long held condemnation of
contraception, including use of the Pill. As months past after the leaked
documents some took the delay—along with the findings of the majority report—as
an indication that Paul VI would in deed change course. Many progressive
theologians began going on record with such predictions and teaching moral
theology in line with the reasoning of the majority report. Many priests,
confused about the direction the Church would take, were hesitant to advise
engaged and married couples about the morality of birth control for fear that
the Vatican would issue a position that conflicted with their direction.

No comments:

about me

I'm Tom Ponchak. I received a degree in theology from the Franciscan University of Steubenville. After graduation I worked as a parish youth minister in Maryland and a high school religion teacher in Michigan.
In 1997, my wife and I left the Catholic Church and joined the Association of Vineyard Churches, a non-denominational, evangelical faith community. I was the founding pastor of Matthew's House Vineyard in central Florida.
After ten years away from Catholicism, and longing for the Eucharist, I returned to the Church in 2006. I am currently the Director of Adult Faith Formation at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish in Indiana. I am also a member of the Domestic expression of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity.